Materialising Design

Current methods for materialisation within the building industry are based on mass production. They rely on the standardisation of material and fabrication to afford control and optimise material use. With digitisation these methods become outdated and new models for material optimisation emerge. Where subtractive digital fabrication techniques have matured and been applied to realise complex buildings, recent research efforts utilise bespoke machines or industrial robots as general fabrication tools for additive fabrication to innovate mass customised materials with designed performances.

The topic is tackled in the innochain Work package 5 , which will focus on trialling fabrication and planning methods for new designed materials that embed material optimisation within their composition.

Current practices emphasise the stiffness of material to ensure structural performance. Building systems such as louvers or other adjustable shading systems and employ mechanical means to activate change.read more

Industrial modelling clay plays an important role in automotive design when modelling ‘class-A’ surfaces. Design studios around the world use it to prototype vehicles at a 1:1 scale, combining several technologies: sculpting, CAD freeform surface modelling, 3D scanning and CNC machining. This research investigates the use of this material for additive manufacturing. read more

Industrial Partners: designtoproduction, Bluhmer Lehmann. One of the central achievements of digital chain is the ability to mass customise building elements creating individualised solutions and enabling new kinds of building geometries. While methods for the design and production of customised elements have matured, the planning of assembly procedures remains undeveloped in the building sector – in contrast to for example to product design .read more

ESR15 – SMALL SCALE ROBOTIC MANUFACTURING FOR THE LARGE SCALE BUILDINGS

Author: Stephanie Chaltiel

Digital fabrication presumes prefabrication and off-site production. This has vast implications on the environment and building practice as a whole, as transportation increases energy consumption and carbon footprint and logistics necessitate a building logic based on elements effecting problems of tolerances and loosing structural and thermal advantages of monolithic structures while increasing costs and limiting the size of elements.read more

Acadia 2017 James (ESR08) and Sam (ESR12) both attended the Acadia 2017 “Disciplines and Disruption” Conference at MIT in Boston, 2nd-4th November 2017. During the conference, our colleagues from the ICD (Institute of Computational Design and Construction) presented the paper: Multi-Machine Fabrication: An Integrative Design Process Utilising an Autonomous UAV and Industrial Robots for the...read more

ACADIA Autodesk 2017 Research Project Award

Author: Stephanie Chaltiel

The Monolithic Earthen Shells project recieves the ACADIA Autodesk 2017 award for Emerging research. Authors: Stephanie Chaltiel and Maite Bravo are very honoured to recieve the prize. Extract from the ACADIA 2017 proceeding on the Earthen Shells project: This project explores the implementation of additive manufacturing for monolithic shells, based on the deposition of different...read more

The Monolithic Shells robotic Fabrication project has been published in 7 international conferences recently including: in the proceedings of IASS Hamburg 2017, Ecaade Roma 2017, DMSParis 2017, Fab 13 Santiago de Chile, ACADIA MIT Boston. Most have been presented live including the challenging #Pechakucha of IASS Here you can download the PDF of IASS. 10162_manuscript and most...read more

FlectoFold Demonstrator / BauBionik Exhibition / Stuttgart

Author: Saman Saffarian

Design Development, prototyping, evaluation, fabrication & installation of an Elastic-Kinetic Material-Gradient Facade Shading System : FlectoFold
This Large scale demonstrator is being exhibited as part of BauBionik Exhibition opening today at Schloss Rosenstein in Stuttgart, Germany.read more